Tonto Dike, Kano and Daura’s violation, By Lasisi Olagunju

It does not matter whether you are a Senior Advocate or one of these big men of money down South, if you are not a practising Muslim, please do not go to Governor Abdullahi Ganduje’s Kano State from today until the end of Ramadan. If you go there without eating within the tolerable limits of their law, you will go to jail. The Sharia police has announced that it will start arresting anyone who eats in public while the state is fasting. Do not argue that the constitution guarantees freedom of religion and the right to life which includes living and eating anywhere, anytime. That argument won’t help you because Kano State has its law and that law must be enforced in the spirit of true federalism. Which is what I like about our North. It has no time for long, uninteresting English — The Hausa call it dogo turenchi. With that simple order, the state is teaching a lesson in how to be free in a unitary federation. While you are talking big grammar and writing furiously on the need for restructuring and true federalism, this key northern state has used its own state legislature to create a federating unit, autonomous in its laws with an effective state police.

The North does not seek approval from anyone on whatever it wants to do with the Nigerian federation and its laws. It has a freakish dictionary with which it defines what federalism is. It then deploys raw courage to ram that definition down the long throat of timid, southern Nigeria and its flat-footed allies in the Middle Belt. So, please, let anyone outside that enclave who also thinks he knows what true federalism means and wants it take a cue from the courage of leadership from the North and do something.

It would appear that that northern side really is a believer in true federalism and has been acting it in its own unique way. The other time, some lazy louts in the South were asking questions about the gold mines of Zamfara and the proceeds therefrom. Have they received any answer to their query? They won’t get any answer because they cannot be demanding fiscal federalism and still refuse to applaud those taking the argument outside the realm of verbal activism.

As you are reading this, Kano State government will be conducting mass weddings for some 1,500 couples. If you are not from that part, you may never understand why virile men and women who will start fasting today had to be married yesterday. And, do not forget that as Kano commits N30million to these weddings, and as it fights with its anti-public eating law, some unfortunate ladies are struggling to be heard in Abuja. Have you not been reading of policemen raiding night clubs and arresting and assaulting ladies who do night clubbing in our federal capital? Those ones must have also broken some off-centre laws like dressing provocatively. The ones among them who have money and are beautiful and good enough are fleeced and allowed to go home. The poor and ugly there face mobile courts. They transit seamlessly and very fast from innocence to guilt and to conviction. They shout their whispers; their pains are shrill and sore. They wonder why they get arrested, bruised, battered and raped uncensored in a democracy, in the nation’s capital and under a government that wears ‘progressive’ on its forehead. They are too naive to know that the fate they suffer is reserved specifically for the socially devalued. They are victims of a system that takes afternoon rays from its own and proceeds to clothe them with the darkness of dusk. I am surprised that these arrested ladies do not know that their Nigeria has no respectable space for people without the luck of birth and who lack the urgent sense for big money. And, if you are a SAN and you want to fight for these ladies, please do not start quoting expired laws about Abuja being a federal property – a city for and of all. The truth is, Abuja is a city of some privileged people and of the puritans of Nigeria.

Ganduje

The North has never allowed anyone to use the standards of the South to judge it and its ways. It is only in the South that heavy misbehaviours such as going to clubs and eating while others are fasting carry no consequences. What do you think would have happened to Actress Tonto Dike with her forty-seconds video if she were a Kano damsel? The North has no place for sinners who pose in front of rolling cameras and gleefully discuss the length and size of their husbands’ something and how enduring their staying power is. Phallic discussions and disclosures are not ordinarily publicly quoted stuffs anywhere. Those who watch or listen to sinners as that loud lady are as guilty as the one who tempts the pious with sinful display of shame and shamelessness. It is only in the South that a tale as unclean as Tonto Dike’s would have better attention than stories of new things happening all around. The North has graver, horrid problems such as clubbing and eating in public (not banditry and not kidnapping) to think about.

Sin may be a reproach, but sometimes it does some good for the sick. The angry actress may have farted too loud in our rose smelling enclave, but she has tremendously assisted the government in slurring the voice of its implacable enemies. Her story throughout last week clogged the air so thickly that very few remembered that our president was not on leave and was not at his duty post. It would appear that the government should pray (and pay) for more of such manna from sultry girls of southern Nigeria. It shouldn’t be too difficult to have another big bang next week from the sea of shame that surrounds us. The fact that inanities occupy our mental space this desperate period should tell why evil endures in our country. Our husbands know that no matter the degree of their madness, there will always be diversions, deliberate or divine, to cover and clean them up. At least, the government has had a respite on its cluelessness while lousy social media chews at a woman’s x-rated expose on her husband’s conjugal inadequacy.

It doesn’t rain, it pours. While the president’s absence from duty without leave remains unexplained, there has been the abduction of the district head of his Daura by some very daring kidnappers. The abducted man is an in-law of our president who is also the Commander-in-Chief of all our forces – land, sea and air. The kidnapped chief is also the father in-law of the president’s ADC. If that incident was not close enough to the man we employed to watch over our nation, nothing will ever be.

There was this head of hunters who wept bitterly and would not be consoled because a leopard killed his dog. Why would the big man not stop crying because of a dog? If one dog dies, Oluode (head of hunters) should have a hundred others as replacement. But the leopard hunter told the multitude around him that his tears were not for his dog which lost its life. He said he was weeping because the insolent leopard killed his own reputation along with his dog. He was right. I do not know how our president felt on hearing the horror at home. If I were Buhari, I would see that violation inside my ancestors’ place of rest as a very bad omen, a personal devaluation.